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The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Online ISBN:
9780191750465
Print ISBN:
9780199560608
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution

Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.)
Laura Lunger Knoppers
(ed.)
English, Pennsylvania State University
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Laura Lunger Lunger Knoppers is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has published widely on seventeenth-century British literature, politics, religion, and visual culture, especially the works of John Milton. Most recently, she is the author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge, 2011) and editor of the Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford, 2012).

Published online:
28 January 2013
Published in print:
29 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9780191750465
Print ISBN:
9780199560608
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution offers thirty-seven new articles by an international team of literary critics and historians on the writings generated by the tumultuous events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Unprecedented events — civil war, regicide, the abolition of monarchy, proscription of episcopacy, constitutional experiment, and finally the return of monarchy — led to an unprecedented outpouring of texts, including new and transformed literary genres and techniques. The book provides up-to-date scholarship on current issues as well as historical information, textual analysis, and bibliographical tools to help readers understand and appreciate the bold and indeed revolutionary character of writing in mid-seventeenth-century England. The volume aims to be innovative in its attention to the literary and aesthetic aspects of a wide range of political and religious writing, as well as in its demonstration of how literary texts register the political pressures of their time. Opening with contextual articles on religion, politics, society, and culture, the subsequent largely chronological articles analyse particular voices, texts, and genres as they respond to revolutionary events. Attention is given to aesthetic qualities, as well as to bold political and religious ideas, in such writers as James Harrington, Marchamont Nedham, Thomas Hobbes, Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, and Abiezer Coppe. At the same time, the revolutionary political context sheds new light on such well-known literary writers as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan.

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